“Fringe!”
“Here, Zasper,” hysterical breathless laughter. “Coming. I’ve got the twins with me. So to speak.”
One of the twins, so to speak, came lurching up the shaft, battering against the sides, howling as it rose. Zasper grabbed the foremost part of it and passed it into the tunnel behind him, where it fled to the far end and lay there, still howling.
“Melt me!” shrieked a voice from below. “Please, Fringe. Don’t leave us like this. Melt us. Don’t make us live like this.”
“She can’t,” bellowed Zasper in his parade-ground voice. “It’s against Enforcer regulations. If you want to die, do it later, but you’re risking her life with all this delay!”
Then silence and more battering, banging as the second assemblage came up the chimney, lurching and clattering against the rocky walls, to be passed on in its turn.
Poor bastards, Zasper thought, oh, poor little bastards, not a clue how to move, moving on sheer panic and nine tenths of that wrong.
And then Fringe, burned, dirty, bloody, clambered from out of the chimney, and he retreated before her to make room.
At the far end of the horizontal, he sprayed the shaft again before pushing the boxes up, their tiny gravitics whining and hiccuping as the two made pathetic attempts at flight. “Keep the rock clear up there,” he screamed at Danivon, who seemed to be watching bemusedly and not paying attention.
Three things came howling through the stone at him. He got two of them, Fringe got the third, aiming an inch from his chin to do it.
“Sorry about that,” she muttered, climbing past.
When she was halfway up, a thing full of tiny bright teeth emerged from the shaft behind her and burrowed into her leg. She screamed, and Zasper killed it as her blood dripped down onto his face. She kept on climbing.
Then they were out, and Danivon was standing with his back to them spraying the surrounding rock, the dinks whimpering at his feet.
Fringe stared at the flier, shaking her head slowly from side to side. “I see some of us are going to walk out.”
Both Danivon and Zasper glanced at the flier, for the first time considering its size.
“Damn,” Zasper said. “It wouldn’t have made any difference, Fringe. It was the only one they had.”
“Fine rescuers you are,” she remarked.
“There’s room for one of us and the two … the twins,” said Danivon. “You, Fringe.”
“Why me? Let Zasper take them out.”
“Zasper can’t fly the thing. He tried on the way in and almost killed us both.”
“You, then.”
Zasper said, “You’re wounded and he’s not, not much.” There was no argument to that. She was indeed wounded, in several places, though not, Zasper hoped, seriously. Mostly cuts and punctures where toothed or bladed things had caught her. The worse threats, the tiny Doors, the little forcefields, may have been too delicate to force through the melted stone. Perhaps this place was at the forward line of the gods’ advance. Perhaps they hadn’t been totally ready when the Dove left Derbeck. Perhaps they weren’t totally in control yet—he hoped.
“There’s real bad things in there,” said Fringe urgently. “But there’s one that tried to help. He spoke to me through one of the … the dinks. Jordel.”
“Jordel of Hemerlane,” said Zasper. “He’s still there?”
“There, where, Zasper?”
“Never mind. There’s no time. Later.”
“Leave us here,” cried a box. “Leave us here. We don’t want to live like this. Without us there’ll be room….”
“Without you, there’ll be room for two,” said Fringe firmly, kindly, not looking at the assemblages. “Zasper and Danivon wouldn’t leave me; Danivon and I wouldn’t leave Zasper. And I certainly wouldn’t leave Danivon.”
“You wouldn’t?” he begged her. “You wouldn’t, Fringe.”
“Enforcers don’t do that,” she said stiffly, avoiding his outstretched hand. “Damn, Danivon. Move!”
“You wouldn’t leave me?” Danivon asked her softly.
“We stand together,” she said to him. “No, I wouldn’t abandon you, Danivon Luze. Did you think I would?”
He touched her face and she let him do it as she said, “Can you two make it on foot?”
“Do you think these monsters have spread west of here?” Danivon asked.
“They may have blanketed a considerable distance,” Zasper said.
“Not logical,” Fringe contradicted. “Why would they waste time blanketing places where there aren’t any people.” “Good idea,” said Danivon. “That’s where we’ll go.”
“Where?”
“Where there aren’t any people. We’ll stay clear of the settlements, and that’ll probably keep us ahead of the monsters too. If you get out all right, you can come back and ferry us west. We’ll be along the river.”
Danivon busied himself stacking the boxes on top of one another in the flier, trying not to look at the eyes. The boxes still howled, but with diminished energy, as though they had worn out their terror, or been exhausted by it.
“The others have gone on west,” Zasper told Fringe. “Past the Great Wall. The captain told me there’s a gorge upriver, and you should find them not too far past the gorge, where Jory calls noplace.”
“I’ll be back for you.”
“Whenever. We’ll be all right.”
“Zasper. Thank you for coming.”
“It’s as you said. We Enforcers stand together.” He leaned close to her. “Get back to Jory, girl. Stick close to her. Promise.”
She gave him a preoccupied look. “Jory? If you say so, Zas.”
“Promise.”
“Promise.”
He stood back as the flier lifted. Something tentacular extruded itself from the stone, grasped the undercarriage, and tried to pull it back down. Both Zasper and Danivon burned it away and watched the flier lift and turn toward the west.
“Come on, old man,” said Danivon. “Unless you’d like to get more intimately acquainted with these devices.”
“Not really, no.”
Without further conversation the two began to run away westward, down from the rocky prominence they found themselves on and along the grassy verges of the river.
Above them, Fringe tilted the flier to watch them go: Danivon in the lead, Zasper not far behind. Her eyes blurred, and she blinked them clear, leveled the flier and dropped it low over
